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Reassessing Cinema
What the latest box office battle tells us about the future
The recent “live action” remake of Lilo & Stitch went head to head at the box office with the latest and, supposedly, final instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise, and took the number 1 box office spot. Now, ignoring the fact that Disney owns practically the entire media landscape today and had an already popular 23-year-old film to ride the back of, as well as a larger audience share given that it is a ‘family’ movie, what does another remake going head-to-head with a franchise sequel mean for cinema going forward? If anything? Is it that an original screenplay going up against another piece of corporate recycling lost? If that is all this represents then we’ve been seeing that wrestling match play out for quite a while. No, this recent battle for the box office, though not all that consequential, does say something about the current state of Hollywood, but on far wider, ‘meta’ level. In short, these two films both ask the same question: what are we even watching?
In his recent series No CGI is Really Just Invisible CGI, YouTuber and CG Supervisor, Jonas Ussing, has gone into great detail about how much CGI is used in the films that creators and cast say has “no CGI” in it. Most ‘live action’ films today, including the behemoth Tom Cruise franchise, spend a lot of their…
